How Bad is This $10,000 PC from 10 Years Ago??

The EVGA Classified Super Record 2 is an utterly unique piece of gaming history. When it was released, this motherboard and the two CPUs inside it would have set you back nearly 4,000 US dollars. Add some memory, case and power supply, probably a handful of GPUs for that sweet, sweet quad SLI action. And we are dangerously close to a gaming system that would cost $10,000, adjusted for inflation. A gaming system. All I can say is for that kind of money, this thing better be pretty darn future-proof. Better be. Would you look at the time? It's future o'clock. So, to see if the SR2 still shits, we put together a library of awesome games that still support SLI, and we got our hands on not one, but four of the fastest quad SLI GPUs that EVGA ever built to see how this monster holds up nine to 13 years later. Like the video if you think that's a good question to answer. Certainly better than that segue to our sponsor. FlexiSpot. With improved stability, a weight capacity of up to 540 pounds and a 15-year warranty, the FlexiSpot E7 Plus is built to stand the test of time. Pun intended. Check it out at the link down below. The very first thing you'll notice about the classified SR2 is its massive size. This ain't your mama's E-ATX, and it ain't even your pappy's XL-ATX. It uses a form factor of EVGA's own design, HP-TX, that weighs in at a colossal 15 inches by 13 and a half. Their justification? Well, where else are we gonna put the two Xeon workstation CPUs, the 12 sticks of DDR3 memory, and the whopping seven PCIe Gen 2x16 expansion slots? To even get that much hardware support, in spite of EVGA marketing this platform to enthusiasts and gamers, they used an Intel 5520 server chipset. So, as we mentioned before, we've gone with the best chips available for it, a pair of Xeon X5690s. All in, we're talking 24 total threads with 24 megabytes of cache, operating at turbo speeds of up to 3.73 gigahertz. And the word on the street is that if you're willing to risk your substantial investment, 1600 US dollars each, they overclock like wild on this board. Challenge accepted. To make the platform more friendly to consumers, the classified SR2 supports non-ECC RAM. So the same kind you would put in a gaming system rather than a server or a workstation. We did find that the support for it was a little bit spotty, especially when we tried to cobble together kits out of older sticks we had lying around. But thankfully, Corsair still makes DDR3, and they sent over enough sticks for us to cobble together a couple of triple channel DDR3 1600 kits. Will we get better performance than dual channel in games? Almost definitely not. Is it cool? Heck yeah, it is. Is it soft? No. For that, you're gonna need the new Polo from lttstore.com. Time to get this mama-jama installed and... Thankfully, we've got a solution. The one, the only EVGA DG85. I flipping love this case. It's gonna require a little bit of work, but this case unironically holds up extremely well. HDMI pass-through for VR, a built-in rear door for a super clean look, an acrylic side panel, and acrylic interior panel, not to mention ample cable management. The only issue is that these standoffs are not in the right place, though that seems to be more of the board's fault than the case's fault. I'm gonna have to mask these off. Three screws, seems pretty good. Now, something that doesn't hold up as well is the storage support on this board. Modern NVMe drives require a UEFI type firmware rather than an older BIOS type firmware, and the SR2, it ain't got it. There are hacky workarounds involving a bootloader on a SATA device and then handing off to an NVMe device, but for simplicity, we've stuck with tried and true SATA, two terabytes for our library of SLI-compatible games. Now we need to think about power. If we wanna run not one, not two, but four 980Ti's, I mean, that's 1,000 watts right there, and our CPUs are gonna draw up to 130 watts each, that's over 1,200 watts. If only there was someone who made a power supply that could, oh, okay, you spoiled it. Hey, fine, we're using the EVGA Supernova 1600 T2. And the size isn't the only weird thing about this motherboard. I mean, look at all of these extra power connectors. We've got two eight pins for the CPUs and then an additional three six-pin PCI Express for auxiliary power for, well, potentially all these devices. That won't be a problem for us though, because we don't care about cable managing this build. There we go. We chose this particular card because it's a two-slot variant. So when we went to add three more of them, they would actually fit without using risers. Plus, I mean, look, it's an EVGA. We had to go EVGA. Can we have a top-of-the-line GPU with a 384-bit bus and six gigs of memory? It was only $650. Practically pay that much for a GPU with six gigs of memory today. I mean, not quite, but jeez. Anyway, we're gonna take a baseline with just one of these cards, then we're gonna add some more. She works! It's alive! Two CPUs, let's go. What better way to try out our sick gaming system than Crysis 2? Considering it's only running at between 60 and 70 FPS at 1440p, I wouldn't say it's running especially well, but that was kind of this game's whole deal. Let's see if our system can handle something more modern. What about Cyberpunk? No! Hold on, it doesn't say play again. Ah! I wanted to play the new Crysis Cyberpunk, but Red Launcher's crashing even with the legacy patch. That's fine. Let's overclock this thing. Man, I do not remember how to overclock on this platform. In fairness to me, it's been over 10 years, okay? Let's just try dummy OC. Dummy OC, let's go. Oh, it worked. We are over four gigahertz. Dummy OC for the win. Effortless. A little bit more voltage. Easy 4.2, dang. CPUs are only at like 60 degrees too. This is why people used to overclock, because there was a point. I want more though. Oh my God, that was 400 watts. Decided to go for gold here. We went straight to 4.5 gigahertz. Are we going to get it? Oh, oh, she crashed. 4.35? I believe. Nope. Holy screen. We're going to take the EZW at 4.2. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What kind of FPS are we looking at? I'm vibe checking. Frame view doesn't work on Windows 7, so we just have to vibe the FPS. I would say it's not a lot better, but it's a little better. I'm seeing far fewer dips into the mid 60s. That indicates to us that a faster CPU never hurts, but it wasn't our main bottleneck. Thankfully, we have a plan. Let's see how many GPUs we can stuff in here. By the way, did I mention we're sucking back like 500 watts with only one 980 Ti right now? To somewhat control our benchmarking, I am going to look at this flame. That's going to be our scene. 93 frames per second. A do, do, do, a do, do, do. And now you see why we didn't bother cable managing anything. While there are nine PCI slots at the back, and in theory, that's all we need because the first two are unoccupied, and then we've got seven. All right. That last card is a double slot card, and there's nowhere for it to go. That's where our new case comes in. Did Justin make this test bench? Oh yeah. Did he do it really fast? Oh yeah. Nice. Unironically, this is how a lot of people ran SR2s. I mean, it's right in the name. This was not a daily driver platform for regular consumers. It's the super record two. Something about loading up a motherboard with GPUs that just, man, I miss it. Time for the big moment. The quad SLI bridge. Oh yeah. Now for the most fun part. Configure SLI. Maximize 3D performance. Casual 400 watts at the desktop. 500 watts at the desktop. No big deal. This really is the Hummer of gaming machines. All this brick of GPUs would cost you back when it was new. It's $2,600 US. Accounting for inflation is about equivalent to two 4090s today. But hey, it's got 24 gigs of VRAM, just like a 4090. Maybe it'll keep up. No, that's not how that works. That's not how any of this works. Last time we ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark on this system, it was with just one card. We got around 2,200 points, coming just shy of 90 frames per second. Four-way SLI scaling isn't perfect, but I gotta say, I was expecting a little better than that. Here's the thing. Remember that 24 gigs of VRAM? Well, it's split between all four different cards. They don't just get to pool it together. Every one of these has to hold their own copy of any asset that's required in order to render the scene. Also, this SLI link, not that fast. So the inter-card communication adds a ton of overhead as they're coordinating who's working on exactly what. What this means is that, especially beyond two cards, the scaling is awful. And the worst part is that none of that is the worst part. It's hard to pick up on camera, but... Oh, yeah, there it is. You probably saw that. Microstutter, which is caused by uneven timing of the delivered finished frames, can be very distracting and make a higher frame rate feel like a lower one because of the hitches and choppiness. But I'm not gonna let that dampen my enthusiasm. Let's run some games. All right, here we go. You can't... It's like not even 10 FPS. It's 96. Oh my God. Hold on, hold on. We haven't gotten down to our fire yet. We gotta look at the fire. Maybe this setup is fire and all we're drawing is 800 watts. You know what? Hold on a second. No, no, this is faster. We're at 195, 120 FPS. 140, 150 FPS. That's legit, actually, because we were getting 90 something before. The 50% improvement, nevermind that two cards probably would have gotten to very similar numbers. But then we wouldn't get to see the sweet, sweet SLI times four. Yeah. Top left, trying to launch another SLI game. Let's see how compatible SLI was with video games back then. Could we have done 4K? Woo, she's floaty. And that 60 FPS does not feel like 60 FPS. Truly awful. I wanna see 1440p. Man, this bottom card, the fan just keeps turning off and going back on. It's not doing anything. Well, we're drawing 630 watts. It's actually less than I was expecting. It's a lot less than I was expecting. They're definitely not going to full usage. Nope. I mean, I think if it's all the way, all four cards are being used. So we are basically not touching our quad SLI. We're using like one and a half cards. Something to keep in mind is that even games that support SLI don't necessarily support three-way or four-way SLI. Let alone take like full advantage of it. Like support does not mean utilize. Titanfall 2? Yeah. It was on the list. Crank it. Times eight. Yeah. Yeah, it'll do 8x MSAA. Ah, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. I'm getting over a hundred FPS. 1080p. 1080, but this is cranked 1080p. By the time you put on 8x MSAA, you might as well be running at a higher resolution. Yeah, but look, we're using still like one, maybe two cards. Yep. All we're really learning is that the 980 Ti is a really good card. And we can tell from our power consumption too. Actually our power consumption is around 750 Watts. We are probably getting some benefit. Minor, but some. Yeah. These boys are not doing much. GPU zero, 42, 48, 50, 54. So it's not that only one GPU is doing the work. It's that each GPU is doing very little of it. Okay, I tried Jedi Fallen Order. That's from 2019. Here we go. With the system from 2010 to 2015, depending how you measure it. Oh, I see. This is doing weird stuff in the startup menu, but it is using a lot more of the cards. I paid for the whole card. I want to use the whole card. Yeah, 144. Graphic quality, epic. Here we go. Oh, this does not bode well. That does not look like 60 FPS, sir. I mean, it's using those cards though. Oh yeah. Oh boy. 740, 750, okay. Nevermind, the power is being used. And we're getting 68 FPS. But that looks more like 25. Oh yeah. Even just through the camera, like it should be plain to see that that is not 75 FPS. Oh wow. That was horrible. Yeah. Whoa, did you see that? Was it transitioned? Highest. We're going for it. Absolutely cranked 1080p. Screen cap broke. I mean, game's working. This is only 45 FPS and feels way better than Jedi Fallen Order did at 75. We lost our SLI tracker though. Yeah. We don't know how much is being used. Very little, it turns out. Yeah, 560 Watts. Yep. Ultra plus. Wow. That is a very excited ponytail. Yeah. Why is it shaking so much? Why is everything awful so much? Oh, wow. What is happening? I don't think the Witcher 3, despite saying that it's compatible with SLI, I don't think it likes it at all. But none of that is the fault of the classified SR2. So what if we took a more modern GPU and at least gave it a chance to run these modern games? In fairness to SLI, this was the last generation of cards to use the older style, non high bandwidth link. And before GPUs got this fast, it did work a little better. It was less of a bottleneck. This feels stupid, but I'm doing it. Wait a second. Are there even Windows 7 drivers for the 4090? That is a great question. I don't, I doubt it. Okay. The 4090 doesn't have a driver for Windows 7, but you know what I say to that? No big loss. Cause guess what? The 3090 Ti does. And also happens to be the fastest card EVGA ever made. Well, fastest card they sold. Fastest card they sold. Were you in 1440 before when you got the 130 number or 120 or whatever? 150 at the fire. What? I'm like 140, 150. It's not that much better. Well, we're not the fire yet, I guess. No, but it's not that much better. Right? That's wild then. Hold on. What's our CUDA core counts? Colin, can you look up how many CUDA cores a 980 Ti has and then compare that times four to how many CUDA cores a 3090 Ti has? Vance, can you look it up please? Sure. He tries so hard. As it turns out, the total number of CUDA cores is not that dissimilar with this having about 10,700 and our four 980 Ti's totaling around 11,000. Does it maybe make sense that the performance is about the same? Holy crap. The performance is about the same. Wow. Actually, power consumption's not even that far off. No, 580. Pretty close. This is obviously a case where the CPU is what is holding us back in spite of the fact that we're running at 1440p Ultra. Let's try a more demanding game. Crysis 2 was demanding for its time. Wow. I mean, it looks better. It looks way better. Yeah. You know what? It's super hitchy though. Yeah. We're probably held back a little bit by DDR3 as well. Our CPU, even though we're at like, what? Four gigahertz, the IPC of how many generations is really gonna climb. And something to consider is that if any aspect of this game leaks off of the six cores that are on the one CPU and needs to be handled by the other one, we have to wait around for that QPI link between the CPUs. You can really see it. These birds are like, yeah, they just like stop and then go. I want to try a couple more games though. This is 100% completely, totally fine and playable. This is freaking awesome. Oh, I mean, except I need to get good. That's the only issue. When the CPU is fast enough, you will get a great gaming experience. I would definitely recommend upgrading an older system like this before spending that kind of money on a GPU. But you can throw in your new GPU and then upgrade later if you really want to. You could, as long as you've already got the power supply headroom. Yeah, this is freaking awesome. 400 Watts. Oh, wow. And so much more efficient, which tells us we are still very CPU bottlenecked. Oh, 100%. Our cards fans aren't even turned on. I mean, even if we are capping the frame rate. That is flipping wild. Okay, why is that frame rate capped though? I don't know. You know what? I bet that frame rate cap is a big part of why the CPU is not causing issues as well. Because we're not just running it right up against the limit. Okay, Jedi Fallen Order. I feel good. We're going to play a reasonably modern game on this ancient freaking platform. Plus a 3090T. Well, plus a 3090T. Minor details. This is better, but still sucks. Yeah, this is still very hitchy. I'll give it a sec. Maybe it'll warm up. You know what I want to do now? What? Not now, now, but now that I've seen this, I want to get those 980Ti's running on something a little newer. They might not be that bad. Six gigs of VRAM though. I feel like this is CPU again. Oh wait, no, we're at like 100 FPS. Also, it's not hitching as much anymore. Yeah, it warmed up. This kind of settled in. This is like perfect now. Playable. What do you mean playable? Perfect is a stretch. See, it's not perfect. When he goes to new areas and it has to load for a second, it struggles. It is damn playable. Markedly better. I'd like to see you play this game on your 13-year-old console. Oh yeah, no, that's not gonna work. Mind you, your 13-year-old console wouldn't have cost you a thousand dollars to upgrade. Or to begin with. You know what else needs an upgrade? The Segwit. Just kidding, not yet. I wanted to talk about how much fun we had building this. Okay, it was kind of a disaster and there were compatibility issues, just like in the old days, but like overclocking, man. We've got a meaningful improvement in performance in Crysis for like 15, 25 minutes of effort. Do you guys even overclock anymore? We're gonna link a community poll in the video description. Just doesn't feel worth it. And man, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the polo shirt with the collar or the old hardware, but this was an absolute blast. 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Check out the FlexiSpot E7 Plus using the link below and use the code provided to get $50 off your order of $500 or more. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the predecessor to this, Intel Skull Trail. It was worse. But in some ways cooler.